{"id":3472,"date":"2014-11-22T14:17:41","date_gmt":"2014-11-22T22:17:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/?p=3472"},"modified":"2014-11-26T09:40:33","modified_gmt":"2014-11-26T17:40:33","slug":"a-professional-minister-vs-professional-bureaucrats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/2014\/a-professional-minister-vs-professional-bureaucrats\/","title":{"rendered":"A Professional Minister vs. Professional Bureaucrats"},"content":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0political climate in Ulaanbaatar<\/a> is now\u00a0in favour of the\u00a0pro-professional cabinet.\u00a0 President, Chairman, members of parliament, and even well-known columnist Baabar advised Mr. New Prime Minister to recruit professionals outside from the parliament and to tame the parochial interests.\u00a0 This is not new.\u00a0 The majority of past governments, either the coalition or the ruling party, had tried.\u00a0But, I would doubt – this ad hoc<\/em> solution would address the deep problem of governance – because the current structure of the public service continues to create incentives for anyone to follow their parochial interests, but not the fine laws of the Public Service and professional merits.\u00a0<\/p>\n

First,\u00a0professionals are frustrated – they don’t want to see another around of the politicization.\u00a0 Now we can categorize the public servants into three major categories: (1) old cadre and senior specialists, (2) newly recruited professionals through merits, and (3) political party-affilliated specialists.\u00a0 The first group are people who are familiar with the bureaucratic routines – who were either part of or worked with experienced cadre of the pre-1990 administrations.\u00a0 Now most accept – they [senior specialists – ‘\u0430\u0445\u043b\u0430\u0445 \u043c\u044d\u0440\u0433\u044d\u0436\u0438\u043b\u0442\u043d\u04af\u04af\u0434’] are shouldering the heavy workload.\u00a0 The second group has been recruited through a standard public service entry process [following the professional merits].\u00a0 They are hardworkers, but poorly paid.\u00a0 The last group could be divided into\u00a0two sub-categories: (1) the true party fanatics – who come and go depending on the election results and\u00a0(2) assimiliators – who find ways to become public servants through the political party line.\u00a0 In comparison with previous two groups, the third group has less incentives and expertise to work, but more accessible to benefits (e.g., travel, schools, awards, bidding, contracts).\u00a0 For sure, the new professional minister and vice minister will bring his\/her own team (e.g., advisors, assistants) and will attempt to provide another opportunities for political party-affilliated specialists.<\/p>\n

Second, it will deepen the unequal distribution of the workload and benefits.\u00a0 After each election, at the national and provincial\/local governments, we would see strong (most of the time, quite explicit) competitions for posts of ministers, vice-ministers, chiefs, and deputy chiefs of agency, chiefs of departments, senior positions of the state-owned enterprises.\u00a0 Why, because these posts are highly paid and accessible to all sorts of public funds and assets.\u00a0 And, even these senior officials create new positions and\u00a0units\u00a0for ‘their’ persons, but not for the workload.\u00a0\u00a0This parochial interest-driven process creates unequal distribution of workload and benefits for public servants.\u00a0 The majority of public servants could not complain\u00a0because they could be easily marginalized or victimized by temporary political appointees.<\/p>\n

Third, the appointment of the professional minister and the ignorance of professional bureaucrats weaken the bureaucracy – which is the core of any government.\u00a0 Obviously, we would\u00a0see three types of\u00a0professional ministers in this new cabinet: (1) A true professional minister – an skillful\u00a0manager, who can\u00a0uphold his professional expertise and ethnics over other interests.\u00a0 (2) A\u00a0‘hijacked’ minister –\u00a0a good manager, but caught up in his\/her personal, factional, and tribal (i.e., provincial) interests.\u00a0 (3) A ‘balanced’ minister – who tries to\u00a0balance\u00a0his professional and parochial interests.\u00a0 But, all these ministers will work under same structural constraints.\u00a0 For one, they are\u00a0all uncertain about the fate of the coalition government\u00a0– since they could not see\u00a0the lifespan of the new government within and beyond one and half year.\u00a0 Second, they and their team would spend 3-6 months to figure out, 3-6 months to implement, and 3-6 months to choose their options before the 2016 election.\u00a0 Third, political parties, political and economic factions, their\u00a0provincial homeland associations (\u043d\u0443\u0442\u0433\u0438\u0439\u043d \u0437\u04e9\u0432\u043b\u04e9\u043b), and others will often pressure them\u00a0either to support their candidates, polices, and tenders\u00a0or\u00a0not to endanger these interests.\u00a0\u00a0Some\u00a0professional ministers would fight against these structural constraints, but most\u00a0wouldn’t because of the audience costs.<\/p>\n

So, what should be done.<\/p>\n

Yes, Mr. New Prime Minister has no options other than to appoint professional ministers, but, it would be a temporary fix – and exacerbate the underlying problems.<\/p>\n

This is up to the parliament.\u00a0 The parliament is the only institution – that could establish a non-partisan commission to examine the public service, to brainstorm with the past and current experts, and to implement a long-term public service reform plan.<\/p>\n

The commission could be headed by influential politicians – former presidents and prime ministers – along with non-partisan experts.\u00a0 They could examine past experiences (even including the communist periods and along with transitional periods of 1990s), asks hard questions on why our fine public service law, regulations, and standards are not solving the problems, and,\u00a0produces the long-term public service reform strategy.<\/p>\n

The public service is the core, the main processor (i.e., computer PC), of the state.\u00a0 Our processor needs an overhaul, if we delay this reform process, the state will implode; the bureaucracy could not respond to any external and internal crisis.\u00a0\u00a0 With a short-term fix, parties will continue to see the public service as a school for their cadre, an asset for their election, and a source of income whereas the political-economic factions\u00a0will consider the\u00a0bureaucracy a tool to increase and\u00a0protect their profits. Only the parliament could dismantle this current public service structure that forces public servants to side with politicians, parties, and factions to survive, but not pursue their professional merits.\u00a0<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The\u00a0political climate in Ulaanbaatar is now\u00a0in favour of the\u00a0pro-professional cabinet.\u00a0 President, Chairman, members of parliament, and even well-known columnist Baabar advised Mr. New Prime Minister to recruit professionals outside from the parliament and to tame the parochial interests.\u00a0 This is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1223,307841,642,1323],"tags":[307958],"class_list":["post-3472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-governance","category-party-politics","category-politics","category-public-service","tag-mendee-jargalsaikhan-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3610"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3472"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3485,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3472\/revisions\/3485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/mongolia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}